Ok, I know what you're thinking by the title...this guy must be a complete moron if he doesn't know how to adjust the instrument lighting on his dash!

But that's not it at all...I know full well how to adjust the brightness of the instruments/gauges. I am interested to know if anyone has experimented with setting the brightness lower than the lowest setting?

You're probably wondering why anyone would want to go dimmer? Well if you've read anything about the effects of blue light on your night vision you would probably know. I came from a 98 Prelude that had orange instrument lighting that went very dim. This was very nice as red light does not affect your night vision at all. And when I'm driving at night I turn my instruments down as low as possible so my attention can be focused on the road ahead.

The problem with the TL is that it has bright blue/white (I have an '06 base) lighting, and even on it's lowest setting it distracts my eyes from the road.

I am not an electrician, but there must be a way to set the instruments to go dimmer, such as by installing a resistor before the dimmer switch? If that would work, my only problem would be that I would still like the full brightness for daytime driving. So ultimately I am looking for a wider range of adjustment on the dim side.

Does anyone have any experience or thoughts in this area?

 

You'll excuse my slightly off topicness, but you might have extreme light sensivity/photophobia.

I am like that for a lot of things, sometimes it is very difficult for me to concentrate while going against traffic and having headlights shine my way, but I definitely do not have an issue with the instrument cluster on the TL. At the dimmest it is hardly visible in my TL and definitely does not detract from night vision.

Either way, if you want dimmer, you'll need to modify the gauges. You can read in detail about that in the service manual at page 22-254 and forward. There's a dimming circuit component with no details though, so you might need to open it up yourself and peruse... electrician or not. :P

Also there's LEDs for everything in the gauges so you might be able to change them for similar spec'ed red ones to suit your needs. Makeshift TL-S gauges...

 

Well, I am a ginger...and I've been told red-heads are typically more sensitive to light.

Thanks for the other info, I'll check it out. I've thought about the Type S gauge swap, but I don't want to modify too much.

 

I'm not sure if this applies to your eyes or just your skin though.


The way it's made, there's a dimming circuit in the gauge cluster and the leds, so you'll have to modify either one of those. Since you want to retain full functionality during the day, I'd imagine this would be your best bet.

If even during the day it was too bright for you, a very light film to darken the cluster a tad could be applied I guess.